Pages

Tuesday, December 9, 2014

Old Horsey Terms

Studs, Mares, and Horses

by Sue Millard

Stud

You think you know this one, don’t you? So did I, and I was wrong.

I understood this word to mean a collection of horses. A stud could mean mares and a stallion for breeding purposes – “It was said of one sportsman that he came to Cheltenham with a wife and a stud of ten horses, and left it with ten children and his stud down to one – but the devil of a rider still!” (from Malcolm MacDonald’s novel about Victorian England, Abigail). Or else it was a stable full of riding horses. In North America the term “stud” often means just the male horse, a stallion – and also in “stud colt”, a juvenile male.

Consequently I was very surprised when I read in the Oxford English Dictionary that “stod” in Old English was a gender-neutral term that could mean any horse, and certainly not just a male. It comes from the Scandinavian roots of English; and in modern German Stute means a mare! There is an old farm in Cumbria not far from where I live that is called “Studfold” – an enclosed field where a herd of mares was kept. “Stud” is recorded around 1000AD as the group term for a number of horses in single ownership, or kept in one place.

Mare

Having given my understanding of the “stud” a considerable whack, the Oxford English Dictionary repeated the trick when I looked up “mare”. This is an even older term that is, you guessed it, another gender-neutral term for a horse, and so, again, not exclusively the female. If you have read the Lord of the Rings, you may recall Gandalf being told that the grey horse Shadowfax is “one of the mearas”. Tolkien was using Old English, as he did with quite a lot of other words that he gave to the Rohirrim. I’m quite sure he was familiar with Beowulf, where there are lines about mearas being led through the feasting hall in decorated headgear – possibly similar to this earlier celtic style face protection:

Horse

By now you can probably guess with confidence that this is another generic term, and indeed I think most non-equestrians would still use it that way today. It’s from Common Germanic and Old Saxon, and it pops up in lots of northern English placenames. Several Cumbrian villages owe their names to this Viking word: Rosthwaite means a clearing for a horse and Rosgill is the little valley of the horse. There’s another clue in the fact that both are pronounced locally with the unvoiced S sound, not the Z we hear in the word roses.

Most of the Fell pony breeders in northern England still call their animals “hosses” rather than ponies – “pony” is a term that, having only appeared in the mid 17th century, is comparatively modern! But “hoss” lives on!

Capall

Latin has donated the word caballus – a horse, mare or hack – to several languages in Europe. Icelandic has kapall, Manx has cabbyl, Irish has capall, capull (but apparently not in Old Irish), Breton has caval; Welsh has ceffyl, and Cornish cevil, kevil, keffyl. I’m sure Richard Nankivell, the “Old Horse” who broadcasts on Radio Cumbria, is aware that his Cornish name means “Horse Valley”. These word variants seem to have come into each language direct from Latin, and not from each other as sometimes happens. In English the term is not recorded until the late 13th C, c1290 Land Cokaygne Hors, no capil, kowe, no ox; and a little later, in 1362, Langland’sPiers PlowmanÞenne Concience on his Capul Carieth forþ Faste. (Then Conscience on his little horse carries forth fast…).

Nag

A nag was a small horse, and therefore a cheap one – size, like modern horsepower in cars, becoming more and more expensive the more of it you wanted to buy. C. M. Woolgar’s Household accounts from medieval England (1992) cites an account ofc.1336–7 Item in i ferro anteriore pro le nagg et i remocione pro morel ii d. (Item, 1 [new] front shoe for the nag and 1 remove [old shoe replaced] for the black horse, 2 pence), and in 440 Promptiorum Parvulorum Nagge, or lytylle beest.

And of course there is also the well-known 1535 Act of Henry VIII concerning the size of horses that he wanted his gentry to keep, and the removal of “Horses and nagges of small stature and value” from the breeding pastures, so as to ensure a good supply of large animals. For three centuries, from mid-16th C to late 19th C, “nag” and “Galloway” lived in much the same pigeon-hole and were, no doubt, equally used and abused as “maids of all work” in the horsey world.

Sumpters, badgers, broggers and chapmen

Finally, I have to admit I have been surprised again by the dictionary. I can’t remember which eminent horse writer first gave me the idea that a “sumpter” was a pack-horse (and I wrongly defined the word “sumpter” on this blog in February 2014!), but the OED is very clear that a sumpter is actually the man who leads, loads and looks after the pack-horses.

c1320 Brasenose College Muniments mentions “Robert the Sumpter”.

c1420 Sir Amadace xxx, His sometour and his palfray-mon bothe. [both his pack-horse man and his riding-horse man]

Other specific job names linked to pack-horse use are the “badger” – a corn dealer; the “coper” a horse-dealer; and the “brogger” – a dealer or broker, especially a carrier of wool both as fleeces to be cleaned, carded and spun, and goods woven or knitted from it. There was also the “chapman” who was a peddler of small goods such as buttons, needles and threads, and reading material in the form of “chap-books”, which were small printed pamphlets containing songs, ballads, and stories of sensational interest such as disasters and executions. Although the Cleveland Bay horse is said to descend from “Chapman horses”, ie, pack horses, only a highly successful chapman would have needed to carry his lightweight wares on pack-horses.

Pack-horses in fact carried almost every kind of produce, from edible to utilitarian to raw materials: fish, cheese, fruit, grain; turf, lime, straw, hay; metal ores such as silver, copper and lead in their raw state from mines to the smelter, and as ingots or “pigs” from the smelter to cities or ports. In the North of England, tracks that were used by pack-horses carrying lead ore are often still known as “Jingling Gate” (gate meaning the Scandinavian “way” or “path” and “jingling” from the bell-collar worn by the leading pack-horse of the group). Also, if you find a pub called “The Clickham Inn” it probably once served a busy pack-horse route.

We no longer have these terms at our tongue’s ends, the way we talk today about hatchbacks, sports cars, SUVs and people carriers. And that’s a sign of the changing times: we have to dig into historical dictionaries, or the heads of addicts like me, to discover the meanings of the terms that people once used daily to describe their fastest means of transport.

References drawn from the Oxford English Dictionary’s Historical Thesaurus.

Welcome to EHFA!

Book of the Day

Search This Blog

Follow by Email

Follow us on Twitter

About EHFA

Britain leaves us awed by ancient castles, palaces and museums. History pours out a legacy of battles, a developing monarchy, a structured class system, court-inspired behaviors and fashions, artwork and writings that have created a love for all things British. Some of us feel that we must fuel the fire~ we have come together to share our historical work and to reach out to our much appreciated readers. Please enjoy our posts about the history of England, Scotland, Wales and all the Empire.

Translate

Our Anthology

Castles, Customs, and Kings: True Tales by English Historical Fiction Authors. Available in print, for Kindle, and Audiobook